physical to virtual help

[SuperPippo]

Hello to all,

I have a mission critical server that will be completely rebuilt on new hardware in a couple of months (no virtualization here).

However, we do have some concerns over the current hardware stability so I need to temporarily migrate it to a new, more modern hardware within the next days.

I was wondering, because it's only a temporary migration, would it be maybe easier to just install a vmware server product on the new server (both are HP servers) and virtualize the current server ?

Because no budget has been planned for virtualizing, It would have to be a free product (gsx server ?).

Do I have any possibilities to virtualize this, and in that case would it be feasible ? I do have experience with esx 2.x but I have never done any ptv installations.Is it easier to do ptv compared to a fairly complex bare metal migration (it's a financial platform system) ?

Any tips are welcome!

Thanks

[mcowger]

I wouldn't be virtualizing a mission critical system A) as my first VM or B) on a hosted platform like Server.

--Matt

[dmorgan]

P2V would be the easier part. Main thing here is, assuming this is a Windows machine, is the licensing. If you have a site license for the server OS, then no big deal, but if not, then it will complain and need to be re-licensed. Then, when you go back to do the V2P, it will complain again, thanks MS! Also, V2P is a bit more convoluted, I haven't dont very many, and none have gone well. Platespin makes some good products for doing this, but they arent the cheapest out there.

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[Dave_Mishchenko]

I'd also echo Matt's concerns about this and consider just moving it to the new host as a physical server. There's lot of tools to help you with that process.

If you do go with a VM, I would look at VMware Converter - http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/. It's free and will convert a physical host to VMware Server or ESX. You can also use this tool http://sanbarrow.com/moa.html to built a bootable CD with will allow you to cold clone your current host.